Babylon 5 — S0E01: The Gathering

Since Babylon 5 is currently made available free to watch on YouTube, I have decided to re-watch the entire series together with the rest of the internet, as new episodes are uploaded. It’s been a few years since my last run through maybe the best single science fiction show ever produced, so I guess it’s time. And since I’ve never written about B5 in detail on this blog, even though the show has been a passion of mine since the late ’90s, I decided to blog along with this re-watch.

So here we go. A review of the Babylon 5 pilot “The Gathering”.

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“Commander … you know everything about your stone garden. But clearly, you have not spent nearly enough time looking at it.” — Delenn

Having not watched Babylon 5 in a few years, I had forgotten how good this show is. I mean, I remember it being good, but rather in abstract. I had forgotten how good it is in detail. For a pilot episode, this one is really good. Like many other sci-fi shows it has its production issues — the original Star Trek and also Firefly come to mind — which in this case mostly come down to changes in casting and in some of the costumes and make-up from the pilot to the first actual episode. But J. Michael Straczynski being the genius writer that he is, he handled the casting changes deftly and with writing flourish.

I must confess that I don’t know how good this episode is as a pilot if you’re watching the show for the first time. That experience is so far in my past that I cannot remember it at all. I would think the episode does a good job in introducing all the different factions, interests and the station itself. I just don’t know if it hooks you right away. They sure throw out enough interesting lures to further mysteries. Why do the Narn have no telepaths? What happened at The Line that stopped the Minbari from conquering Earth? What is it that the Minbari know that commander Sinclair can’t remember? What does a Vorlon look like inside his suit? What exactly happened to Babylon 1 through 4

One thing I know is that I was completely on board when I first watched “The Gathering”, but then I’m a total sci-fi nerd so that probably isn’t indicative of the average viewer.

The plot of this 1 ½ hour pilot does its job. It’s not a brilliant story, but it is a decently written whodunnit with a twist that is a bit of a classic science fiction staple: the shapeshifting murderer who hides the bodies of his victims to stay undetected. To sum it up: Babylon 5 is a diplomatic station awaiting the final ambassador of the five races that have come together to create the Babylon peace project. When the fifth ambassador arrives, he is attacked and nearly dies. In the course of the investigation, Commander Sinclair (Babylon 5’s commanding officer) becomes the main suspect and must hunt down the real assassin. Meanwhile, friendships and loyalties are put to the test as Security Chief Garibaldi must investigate his own CO and first officer Takashima, station doctor Benjamin Kyle and newly-arrived Psi Corps telepath Lyta Alexander defy orders from Earth Alliance command and the Vorlon government and risk their careers to find out how the ambassador was attacked.

It is wild how much foreshadowing JMS packed into the pilot — at a point where he didn’t even know the show would even be produced. One thing I’ve never noticed, in the maybe five or six times I have watched this show before, is that the first words Kosh utters when arriving at the station, and greeting who he believes to be is Sinclair, are: “Entil’Zha Valen”. This is foreshadowing for a huge plot point in an episode late in season 3! Crazy. And there are so many more small details.

Rewatching this also drives home how different TV shows were back then. Sure, the effects might be janky and the camera very static, but the dialogue is so much more powerful then what you get these days. When Sinclair talks about being at The Line, it’s just dialogue. These days there would be a long flashback, maybe a whole episode, with CGI and shit. Back then, it was just some overlaid voice lines and his speech. And I actually had to wipe away a tear or two, because O’Hare delivers it so well. Compared with the sci-fi slob being produced today, it is very refreshing how adult this show is. It treats its viewers as equals, it doesn’t talk down to you.

“There’s a hole in your mind.” — Minbari assassin

Lots of dialogue doesn’t make sense because you don’t have all the information for it to make sense yet. And that is on purpose. Plot points aren’t explained and re-stated in different ways again and again, because the show runners don’t think their audience is dumb. On the contrary. The show treats you like an adult human being. Which is very refreshing these days. Funnily enough, this show is in some respects very old-school and in others decades ahead of its time. For example, Delenn nearly ended up as a male Minbari. With all the consequences that would have had in later episodes of the show …

I enjoyed this re-watch of “The Gathering” very much and I think I will continue watching along as the show is released on YouTube. Hopefully, I’m able to blog along as I do so, as well.

To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield!

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As Straczynski was very involved in talking to fans in internet newsgroups during the show’s original run, we have many interesting comments from him on the various episodes. Here are some on “The Gathering”:

“Actually, at one point or another, just about everyone lied in the course of the pilot … including Sinclair, who lied to G’Kar, and of course Delenn lying to Sinclair in the Garden … and so on.”

“The one thing that I dropped fairly completely due to the delay in getting the series going was the Laurel thread, which has now mutated and become something even more interesting, actually. It’s something that’s enabled me to now build in a trap door that you won’t see for a long time, even though it’s sitting there in plain sight.”

“What it does give me, which is kinda nice, is that the only two people to have ANY direct contact with a Vorlon have been transferred back to Earth. Which plays wonderfully into something sinister I’d kinda like to develop that the Earth Alliance is working on behind the scenes…”

“As for the Vorlon handshake (so to speak)…this will be dealt with in the series. You have to remember that the original plan was to air the pilot and go immediately into series, where we’d bring up some of these questions. There simply wasn’t room to deal with EVERYTHING in that short pilot…and where we DID try and cover everything, we got gigged for being expositional. Now we have to re-establish a few things since there’s been a gap in time…but the poison incident will be raised in “The Parliament of Dreams” script to start with, and move on from there.”

“The Observation Dome has equipment to detect approaching ships. The spider transport approaches without being noticed. The surface of the station would likely have sensors to detect something attaching itself to the hull. Somehow these were over-ridden. The only time that anyone notices, up in the Dome, is later, when Laurel isn’t there, interestingly enough. Someone deliberately programmed the transport tube to delay Sinclair. The assassin would have to know this in advance. We saw Londo with the assassin. We also saw Garibaldi, Lyta, Dr. Kyle and – later – Sinclair with the assassin, each relating to him in different ways. Who was the one person we never saw with the assassin, whose reactions might have told us something? Who was the one put in charge of the station when Sinclair was pulled out of circulation? Laurel. We had some…interesting things in mind for this character. Now that another character has come in, some things will be modified, but other elements will come in to replace them.”

“Here’s one little extra for you: only one person aboard Babylon 5 has any idea of what a Vorlon is, inside that suit, and only one race has had dealings with the Vorlons before. Watch the reception at the end, and see if you notice anything unusual in the way the various people respond to Kosh.”

“We’d originally planned to go for a more vague sexuality for Delenn; a male physically and primarily in the voice, on top of the natural female movements one gets from an actress. In post-production, however, we couldn’t get the voice to sound as good and male as we’d wanted. In addition, a couple of convention showing of a rough cut saw people responding VERY strongly to her voice as it was, so we finally decided to let it stand and change the one reference to “he” to “she,” and that was the end of it.”

“As I’ve noted elsewhere, G’Kar made mention of the need for genetic alteration/modification during the scene with Lyta. Beyond that, though, G’Kar’s personal perversion is sex with humans, which no one else seems quite able to understand …”